George Steiner on The Poetry of Thought

George Steiner on The Poetry of Thought

16 Apr 2009

Speakers: George Steiner

Renowned polyglot and polymath George Steiner has long been recognised as one of the most original minds and brilliant lecturers of our generation.

In this talk he explains his theories on the poetry of thought, examining how even the most stringent prose, dealing with subjects of great complexity, can be imbued with an unconscious poetry. As examples of this, he cites the iambic drum beat at the beginning of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, how Machiavelli created surprise by delaying important information until the end of a sentence, and how the prose of Alice in Wonderland was “made to smile” by its author. Finally, he introduces the “incomparable Plato”, with his ability to “make thought sing”. The grace of his expression on the subject of the immortality of the soul has, Steiner argues, allowed him to hold a continuous influence over metaphysics and religion for some 2,500 years.

Steiner goes on to ask whether we are now at a fundamental turning point in the way that we view the very processes of human thought. Should we consider thought any longer as a natural, poetic, exclusively human process, or has it been revealed as purely scientific: a question of neurology, synapses and molecules? This was the horrifying dilemma Steiner was faced with in 1996, when he found out that Chess Grand Master Gary Kasparov had been beaten by a computer. Was this the moment when a machine had become capable of real thought?

The world is changing, insists Steiner, refusing to say whether it’s for better or worse. Machines and computers continue to become more and more sophisticated, while people read less and less. But this illiteracy does not necessarily amount to ignorance. The very nature of traditional language is evolving into something more pictorial, numerical, and even musical. Who are we to criticise the next generation, he concludes, which is increasingly choosing to reject the “disorder and messiness of natural language”?